


be careful of my heart

by cloudghost



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: (kind of a prerequisite for this trope), Alternate Universe - Coming Back to Town Years Later, F/F, I know the summary makes it sound dramatic, and a happy ending of course bc it's the only kind of ending I want, and most of the others, but I was laughing almost the entire time while proof-reading this, even during the parts that aren't even meant to be funny tbh, featuring a misunderstanding and lots of failed communication, so there's that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-19
Updated: 2019-11-19
Packaged: 2021-02-13 12:16:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21494155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cloudghost/pseuds/cloudghost
Summary: “Korra,” Asami says, as carefully as she’d hold a shivering baby bird in her hands. “How have you been?”The sudden quiet that falls over their table makes Korra want to squirm. Could her friends be any more obvious about wanting to hear their conversation?“Fine,” she says, then clamps her mouth shut and looks down at her hands, balled into fists in her lap. She’s not sure what will come out if she lets herself talk to Asami. She doesn’t want to ruin everyone’s night. Coming here was a mistake after all, but it’s not like she didn’t know it beforehand.
Relationships: Korra/Asami Sato
Comments: 31
Kudos: 267





	be careful of my heart

“What are you missing,” Korra mumbles, staring at the sturdy oak table she’s custom-making for Lin Beifong.

Her nature sounds playlist is blasting whale song, so she doesn’t hear Bolin trying to get her attention until he’s right next to her.

“Korra,” he says into her ear. She jerks back and whirls around, lowering her leg again when she recognises him. He watches its way down warily. “Were you going to kick me?”

She shrugs. “You know what happens when you sneak up on me. My instincts kick in.”

“I wouldn’t call bellowing your name at the top of my lungs sneaking up on you. Maybe it’s time to consider the volume of those… What is it this time? Kind of sounds like a banshee’s wail, to be honest. Save yourself!”

Bolin covers his ears, all of his movements exaggerated, and Korra rolls her eyes.

“Very funny.”

“No, wait, it sounds like a huge group of ghosts all trying and failing to speak at the same time. That one’s better.”

“Debatable.”

“Is that Lin’s table?” Bolin asks with an appreciative hum. “She’s going to love it. Or not hate it, at least. She’s hard to read.”

Korra studies him, her eyes narrowing slightly. “Not that it isn’t always nice to see you, but is your riveting commentary on my work the only reason you came here in the middle of the day? Are you really that bored?”

Bolin tilts his head to the side and frowns at her. “You do know it’s almost sundown?”

“Of course I know that,” she says quickly, too boisterous to be believable, even to herself. “I just misspoke.”

“Right. Anyway, I came here because…” He pauses. “Wait, what was the reason again? It’s hard to form coherent thoughts with that army of ghosts unsuccessfully communicating out of your stereo.”

“That’s kind of the point,” Korra says, but goes to turn it off anyway. Once uncomfortable quiet has settled over her workshop, she raises her eyebrows at Bolin. “Well?”

The confusion fades from Bolin’s face and is replaced by realisation. He lightly slaps his forehead. “Of course, I remember now. Maybe you should sit down.”

“Bolin, out with it already.”

Bolin’s mouth tugs downwards at the corners. Korra actually starts to worry that something bad has happened when his next words reach her and suspend her in time and space.

“Asami’s back.”

The next thing she knows is that Bolin’s waving a hand in front of her face, a worried expression on his own.

“Korra? You all right?”

She blinks, then says, “Sure.” Her voice sounds far away to her own ears. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Worried her trembling hands will give her away, she stuffs them into her pockets.

“Okay,” Bolin says in a tone that makes it clear he doesn’t believe her one bit.

“Why—” Korra clears her throat. It feels like there’s a stone in there that she has to force her words past. “Did she say why she’s back?”

“We were at Suyin’s for lunch when she suddenly walked in. She said she’s finally taken care of everything, you know, after that whole thing with her father. And she said that she’s left it all behind once and for all. She asked about you.”

Korra huffs. “And did she explain why she left the way she did?”

“Korra, we’ve been over this.” Bolin is unable to hide the exasperated note his words carry. “You saw what happened on the news. When she got word that her father had been arrested, she probably had to leave right away and didn’t have time to say goodbye.”

“Well, Bolin, we’ve also been over _this_: she could have called or written. It really isn’t all that hard. And yet she didn’t. She didn’t contact us at all, like it hadn’t meant anything, like I… we didn’t mean anything to her.” Bolin opens his mouth, undoubtedly to protest. Korra shakes her head. “Forgive her all you want, but that’s not something I, personally, can move past so easily.”

Bolin frowns, unable to rebut that, and Korra tries and fails to stop her smugness from showing in her expression. He sighs.

“So she made a mistake. She’s missed us, Korra, she really has. I know she wasn’t lying. And now she’s back for good. She wants to stay.”

Korra swallows her anger down all the way into her hands, which clench into fists.

“You’ve missed her, too,” Bolin continues. “We all know you have. Would it be so bad to give her another chance? We’re meeting again tonight, the whole gang, excluding you so far. Won’t you come join us?”

Biting down on her bottom lip, Korra shakes her head. “I can’t…” She takes a deep breath and looks away. “I can’t see her, Bolin. I can’t. Not today. Give me some time.”

“It’s been almost three years. Are you just going to avoid her forever? We don’t exactly live in a sprawling city, you know. You’re going to run into her sooner or later.”

Korra doesn’t say anything and goes back to studying the incomplete table in front of her. The absence of whale song makes the silence settle over her heavily. It feels like two hands are pressing down on her shoulders, and she fights the urge to check to make sure they aren’t actually there.

“Korra,” Bolin says, and his voice is so soft that Korra can’t help but look at him again. “Wouldn’t you rather meet her again on your own terms? All of us will be there as a buffer tonight. If it’s too much for you, just start coughing or something and I’ll come up with an excuse for why you have to leave.”

Korra runs a hand through her chin-length hair and bunches it up at the back of her head.

“I don’t know if…” she starts, not knowing how to continue that sentence.

“Won’t you at least try? You know we care about both of you. If Asami is really going to stay, wouldn’t it be best if we could all get along?”

‘Best for us, not for you,’ is what he isn’t saying. She feels a pang at the thought that Asami, who they’ve known for a much shorter time than Korra, is just as important to them. That they wouldn’t choose her over Asami. With a start, she tries to shake off those toxic feelings of jealousy and bitterness, literally and figuratively.

After raising an eyebrow at her, Bolin finally shrugs. “Think about it. We’re meeting at Bumi’s bar at six.”

He turns around, waves over his shoulder and finally leaves Korra’s workshop, which is really just a shed.

As quickly as she can on legs that feel decidedly wobbly, she walks over to her stereo and turns the whale song back on with shaking fingers. Their eerily beautiful voices help her release the tension in her frame, and with a sigh she closes her eyes and focuses on her breathing.

Asami is back. For a long time, Korra dreamed of the day she’d return. She thought of things Asami might say, of something that would explain all the confusion away and finally, finally do something about the pit of sadness her sudden disappearance had left behind in Korra’s emotional landscape.

For a long time, yes, but not anymore. She gave up on that over a year ago. What kind of life would it be to always wait for something that might never happen? So she decided to cover the pit of sadness, ignoring it as best she could. It works, for the most part; unfortunately, covering something up doesn’t mean it isn’t still there underneath.

“I’ll be ready to work on it someday,” Korra says defiantly, not quite sure who it is she feels the need to defy.

“Korra?”

Somehow, Opal’s quiet voice travels better through the whale song than Bolin’s loud one did. Korra looks up and once again presses pause on her stereo, albeit reluctantly.

“What’s up?” she asks. “Did Lin ask about her table? I don’t think I’ll finish it before the deadline, and that won’t change, no matter how often she asks.”

The three of them—Korra, Bolin and Opal—have a small interior design business together. Since they’re the only business of the sort in town, everyone comes to them when they move into a new place or want to redecorate. They had to start advertising in surrounding towns as well, though, because there just aren’t enough people in their town to keep them afloat.

Opal, who studied architecture, does the actual planning. Bolin is in charge of customer relations and marketing, and Korra comes up with custom furniture that Opal sometimes even bases her plans on. Most of the time the customers already have an idea—or a “vision”, as Bolin calls it—of what they want. It’s up to Korra to capture the essence of that, and the challenge of that is where the fun of it lies for her.

“Are you okay?” Opal asks, her eyes scanning Korra as if to look for a glowing neon sign to signal whether she’s in pain or not.

Korra bites back an annoyed retort. She knows Opal’s just worried about her, and she really appreciates it, she does. Only, she’d rather talk about almost anything else.

“Sure.” A forced smile wouldn’t do anything but make Opal worry more, so Korra settles for a nod, trying to give it an air of certainty.

“I know Bolin came to talk to you.” Korra doesn’t roll her eyes, but it’s a near thing. It would honestly shock her more if there were something that Bolin and Opal didn’t know about each other. “He lost a game of rock, paper, scissors.”

Korra raises her eyebrows at Opal, who lets out a small laugh in response.

“No, he volunteered,” Opal says. “He wanted to be the one to talk to you.”

Her insides squirm uncomfortably at the thought that her friends talked about this, about her, about them, Asami and her. Asami, who’s back now. After three damn years. Fine, two years and two hundred and twenty-three days, but who’s counting.

“If you don’t talk to me about this right now, I promise I’ll never again say that I don’t believe people ever actually wrote with octopus ink,” Korra tries.

“It’s a fact, Korra. Whether you deny it or not doesn’t change that. It’s—” Opal cuts herself off, understanding dawning on her face. “Nice try.”

“Didn’t you bet Bolin that you’d be able to stop yourself from arguing about this with me if it ever comes up again?”

Opal groans. “You’re right. Next time at the movies, I’m going to have to watch whatever he chooses without criticising it. I don’t know if I can do it, to be honest.”

“Then don’t tell him,” Korra says with a shrug.

“No.” Opal sounds positively scandalised. She shakes her head. “That’s not how healthy relationships work, Korra.”

“Okay,” Korra says, a sudden pressure on her chest. “Not that I’d know, I guess.”

“Oh, no, that’s not what I—”

Korra waves her off. “Don’t worry about it, Lapo.”

“Okay, I won’t, Arrok,” Opal responds, rolling her eyes. They’re a community of eye-rollers, the lot of them. Maybe there’s something in the water.

“I still say that my name backwards sounds really cool, while yours sounds like someone couldn’t come up with a name so they combined two random syllables.”

“Well, then, what about Imasa?”

“Stop it, Opal. Leave Asami out of this.”

“I would if she weren’t the elephant in the room.”

“Fair warning: I _will_ resort to leaving my workshop to avoid this conversation.”

Opal pinches her lips together. “We’re just worried about you, Korra.”

“I know that,” Korra says, her voice softening. “But you don’t need to be. I’ll be fine. Now please let me get back to work. Lin is the one customer I really don’t want to make wait any longer than necessary.”

The argument going on inside Opal’s head is almost audible until, finally, she deflates. “Fine. However,” she continues when Korra starts turning away, “if you ever feel like you need to talk, you have all of us to choose from. Always. Know that.”

Korra swallows heavily. “I do. Thank you.”

With a nod, Opal leaves.

Standing in front of her stereo, Korra wonders if she should put the whale song on again. She has a sneaking suspicion that Opal isn’t the last person who’s going to come talk to her.

Her suspicions are confirmed when a very uncomfortable-looking Mako walks into Korra’s workshop. She watches him struggle to open his mouth—which seems to be nailed shut going by the trouble he’s having—for several seconds, then decides to put him out of his misery.

“Nope,” she says. “Don’t want to talk about it.”

He nods, obviously relieved, then turns and walks out, his steps noticeably lighter.

Really, Korra can’t complain. To have so many people who care about her is a blessing, not a burden. She boards the door to her workshop shut anyway, effectively stopping anyone else from walking in.

“It’s just you and me now,” she says to the table. “Oh, and the whales,” she adds, turning their song back on.

Getting back to work feels cathartic. There’s a bit less natural light now with the door closed and the sun starting to set, but there’s enough to work by.

The whales help her drown out the memories of Asami surfacing in her mind like plastic ducks that you try to push underwater during a bath.

Above all, though, she aches in a bone-deep kind of way. Not even whale song can do anything about that.

* * *

“My mom lived here for a while when she was small,” Asami said carefully, as if she thought each word might break upon contact with the open air. “She died when I was young.” A sigh. “I never got to know her as well as I wanted to.”

Korra rolled from her stomach onto her side on her bed so she was facing Asami. “You never told me that.”

A pale imitation of a smile twitched Asami’s lips upwards. “I’ve never told anyone.”

“Is that why you first came here, all those years ago?”

“I’m not even sure myself why I came here,” Asami said, her voice so quiet it seemed like she was sharing a secret. “I think I was looking for something. Maybe I was simply hoping to find out more about who she was when she was here. Discover sides of her I never had the chance to know.”

Asami paused, and Korra hummed to show she was listening, her gaze intent on Asami’s face.

“In my head, she’ll always be frozen as who I knew her as before she died,” Asami continued. “Unchanging. Part of me just wants to find out something new about her. I don’t want her to be stuck in my mind, perpetually the same, until one day I start forgetting things about her.”

Asami buried her head in the covers and let out a long breath. Her next words were muffled. “I’ve already almost forgotten the sound of her laughter.”

Korra still remembers that she had no idea what to say. Her instincts told her to put her arms around Asami, but since she wasn’t sure how that would be received, she held herself back.

At that point, Asami had been coming to their town regularly for a couple of years. When she’d first gotten there, she’d been the talk of town; it had always been impossible not to notice new arrivals in a town their size.

No one had been quite sure where she’d come from or why she was there. The general consensus was that it was somehow part of her gap year to spend time in an out-of-the-way town like theirs. And yet she came back during her summer breaks year after year, until she’d firmly cemented her place in town, going from “the girl who visits from out of town” to “the girl who returns from out of town”.

It’s embarrassing to think back on her behaviour then, but Korra hadn’t exactly been Asami’s biggest fan when she first arrived. She’d had a crush on Mako for a while, and soon after her arrival, Asami started dating him. Korra had to admit that she wasn’t always very mature about it.

When the time came that Korra started dating him instead, Asami didn’t return the favour, though; she remained as kind and civil as always.

Eventually, Korra and Mako broke up as well. By then, Korra and Asami had already developed something resembling a friendship that they only solidified in the third summer Asami came to visit.

And then, after Korra’s accident, she pushed everyone but Asami away. They wrote letters when Asami was back at college, and when she was back in town, Asami was somehow the only person Korra really felt at ease around.

When exactly her feelings for Asami changed is anyone’s guess. All she knows is that on the day Asami opened up about her mom, Korra was already in deep.

She liked the way Asami smelled; how she felt in her arms when they hugged in greeting and goodbye; how her hair felt when it accidentally brushed Korra’s arm; how she’d wrinkle her nose at herself when she realised she’d made a mistake; how, when a button on a shirt came undone and the thread she had didn’t match that of the other buttons, she’d undo and reattach them all because—and this was always said in an unbelievably earnest tone, like there wasn’t even any other option—“The buttons have to match, Korra.”

It had gotten to the point where how much she liked her was actually physically painful at times. It was a strange combination of longing, the pre-emptive hurt a rejection would cause her, and a fear of losing her if she ever found out about Korra’s feelings.

So that day, on the bed, instead of reaching out for Asami, Korra sat up and shoved her hands under her thighs so they wouldn’t go rogue and do something silly without her say-so.

“Asami…” she started, unsure in every conceivable way. She probably wasn’t equipped to handle this, but she was going to try her best. Asami had done the same for her after her accident, after all. “What do you need?”

Asami rolled over onto her back with a groan. Her eyes were red but dry. “Nothing you could give me, Korra,” she said, a small, heart-wrenchingly sad smile on her lips. “Unless you have hidden talents in necromancy and can bring my mom back exactly as she was.”

“I mean… not that I know of. And, to be honest, I don’t think that should be messed with. Even if it worked, it’d inevitably go wrong and maybe even start a zombie apocalypse.”

“Not necessarily. What about Sir Daniel Fortesque?”

“Uh… who?”

Asami sat up too, moving her hair out of her face with a flick of her hand. “From the video game ‘MediEvil’? He accidentally gets brought back from the dead and becomes a walking, talking skeleton that saves the world from an evil sorcerer.”

“Riveting,” Korra said dryly, accompanied by a pointed eye-roll. “What kind of life is that, anyway, being a skeleton? You can’t eat, you can’t drink, you can’t kiss, you can’t—There’s a lot of things you can’t do. Can you even sleep?”

“But it is _a_ life, and sometimes that’s enough.” An argumentative note had entered Asami’s voice, and Korra suppressed a smile; she seemed to be feeling a bit better. “If you had to choose right now to either live as a skeleton from now on or be dead, which would you go with?”

“That’s…” Korra shook her head. “I can’t answer that.”

Asami shrugged. “I’d choose to live as a skeleton. It would take some getting used to, but humans are very adaptable. And another argument for bringing back the dead not always going wrong in media: every superhero ever.”

“Those don’t count,” Korra said, waving it off. “They write a single character in so many different ways over the years anyway that they could easily be ten different people.”

With a laugh, Asami squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed a hand over them. “Fair enough. Thanks for entertaining the notion anyway. I could ask you whether the moon is actually a sleeping troll that can never wake up because the sun always shines on it at least a little and you’d give it some thought. I love that about you.”

All of a sudden, Korra’s mouth was suspiciously dry and her attempt at swallowing felt loud enough to echo through her room.

“I like you, Asami,” burst out of her before she knew what was happening, and then she froze. All this time she’d been worrying about her hands when, really, she should have been watching her mouth.

It was the worst possible time for a confession, and Korra cursed herself silently. Not that it would ever be a good time to potentially destroy their friendship. Maybe Asami would at least be further distracted from her previous melancholy mood.

Asami was staring at her, eyes wide. Then she blinked and smiled. “I like you too, Korra. I’m really glad we’re friends.”

Now she just had to keep her mouth shut and nod in agreement, not say it, never say it, not under any circumsta—

“No, not as a friend,” Korra said, so fast that she couldn’t even stop for air in between. “Though I like you like that, too. But I’m also… in love with you. Is what I meant. I think? I don’t know why I’m saying this now. This isn’t a good time. In fact, never would be the only time for this. This wasn’t supposed to happen? I told myself I wouldn’t ever tell you but apparently I don’t even listen to myself, which is probably not a good sign for my future, I mean, self-control is pretty important, if I insulted some dangerous people, for example, that wouldn’t be smart, I really need to work on that.”

Her mouth finally stopped talking and she was able to take a gasping breath. Despite Korra’s breathing filling up the silence in her room, the absence of Asami’s reaction was glaringly obvious.

Stumbling over her own limbs, Korra got up from the bed as quickly as she could.

“I… have to go.”

While avoiding eye contact with an Asami who still hadn’t moved an inch, she hurried out of her room and out the front door, not even bothering to put on shoes.

Muttering, “What have I done, what have I done, what have I done,” continuously under her breath, she zig-zagged through town. Ignoring people’s concerned questions was easy when her own thoughts and heartbeat drowned out almost everything else.

* * *

A knock followed by “Korra?” pulls her out of her thoughts. It’s eerily quiet in her workshop, and a look over at the stereo tells her why—she forgot to put her playlist on repeat.

“Yeah?” she croaks.

“Are you all right, darling? Why is the door boarded shut?” Her mom’s voice sounds slightly muffled through the door.

“I’m fine. I just wanted to concentrate, that’s all.”

“Okay,” Senna says, and the ease with which her mother always believes her warms Korra’s heart. “Are you having dinner with us? Your father wants to know if he should cook for two or three tonight.”

“No, thank you. I’m meeting the others.” _And Asami_, shoots through her head, and the thought makes her hands twitch.

“Have a great time,” her mother calls through the door. “Like I will have with your father. I made these candles the other day that are said to—”

“Okay, thanks, mom! Great talking to you. See you later.”

Senna’s laughter trails after her as she walks away, and Korra rolls her eyes in response.

With one last look at the table, she decides to throw in the towel for the day. It’s not like she’d get much done even if she tried.

Opening the door to her workshop and stepping outside feels like she’s escaping something. When she looks back to make sure, though, the frustratingly unfinished table is all that greets her, along with her stereo and tools.

Korra shakes her head and lightly slaps her cheeks. Snapping out of it sounds like a good idea right about now.

Upon entering their small one-storey house, she’s greeted by the repetitive sound of a knife hitting a chopping board. Almost drowning that out, though, is her father’s singing. Korra can hear her mom cheer and clap along, and she smiles. How content they are with their lives and with each other never fails to be a balm for Korra’s nerves, even on the hardest or most stressful of days.

She sneaks to her room and takes a deep breath when she closes the door behind her. She leans against it and closes her eyes. They snap open again at once when she realises she has no idea what people are supposed to wear for occasions such as this.

On the one hand, she wants Asami to know that she’s been doing fine without her and, okay, to maybe make her regret leaving her like that the tiniest bit. On the other hand, she also doesn’t want to seem like she’s trying too hard to make it seem like she’s over the whole thing, which would, in turn, imply the opposite.

With a groan, Korra whirls around and presses her forehead against the sturdy wood of the door. When that doesn’t give her any more clarity, she deflates.

“First things first,” she murmurs, heaves herself off the door, opens it again and heads to the bathroom to take a shower.

* * *

She grabs Bolin’s arm once they’re in front of Bumi’s bar. “I can’t do this,” she hisses, or rather, tries to; it ends up coming out more like a wheeze.

“Come on, Korra, you like facing things head-on, don’t you?” Bolin whispers back.

He came to pick her up, saying that he wanted to walk together, but Korra knows he did it so she doesn’t have a chance to bail before even giving it a try. He’s not exactly subtle.

“This’ll be good for you.” Bolin grabs her hand and drags her along after him. Her attempt to plant her feet and stall fails; he can be surprisingly strong if he puts his mind to it.

“Traitor,” she grumbles, too quietly for him to hear.

“Hey, guys!” Bolin calls out when they reach their regular table.

A chorus of “hello”s greets them back. Korra doesn’t dare look up from her feet to see if Asami’s there yet, because she has no idea how she’s going to react to seeing Asami again after so long.

Bolin, who’s let go of her hand by now but is still standing close, softly prods her in the side with his elbow.

“You’re being weird,” he mutters out of the corner of his mouth.

At this, Korra finally looks up only so she can glare at Bolin, who smirks like that was exactly his goal. On the way, her gaze gets caught and it snags.

Asami. She’s here, sitting between Opal and Mako, and she’s looking right at Korra. Her breath catches involuntarily.

The moment they make eye-contact, Asami’s face lights up like they last saw each other yesterday, like she didn’t leave Korra behind without a word of good-bye or an explanation almost three years ago. Korra swallows down the surge of bitterness; she did say she’d try.

Making herself look away from Asami is harder than she wants it to be. How can she possibly have changed so little? It’s not like Korra was expecting her to have the word “CEO” tattooed on her forehead or for her to come back all stiff and regal. But she wasn’t expecting her to seem like she’d never left, either, to seem just as she had the last time they’d seen each other. Too much has changed in the meantime; it doesn’t feel right.

Asami’s joyful expression crumples in on itself a bit, replaced by a tiny furrow between her brows and a quizzical tilt to her head.

And that does it; Korra tears her gaze away. It lands on a stain on the wooden table that she’s always thought looks a bit like a unicorn. She sits down on the chair in front of it and doesn’t even really register Bolin sitting down next to her instead of joining Opal on the bench on the other side of the table.

She knows he’s doing that so he can keep his promise to offer her an exit should she need it, and she bumps her knee against his in gratitude. The thought that she has a way out helps her breathe more easily.

Everyone’s talking, or maybe the roaring’s in her head, but she must have ordered at some point, because the waiter sets down some fries in front of her. She can feel that the others are keenly aware that she’s not talking, and she can also feel eyes on her almost all the time. They don’t mention it, though, and she’s incredibly grateful for that.

She pokes and prods at her fries, feeling uninspired to actually eat them. The looks her friends keep sending her have taken on a worried note; Korra tries to ignore them. When she glances up at Asami out of the corner of her eye, she jolts when she realises that Asami’s gaze is already on her.

“Korra,” Asami says, as carefully as she’d hold a shivering baby bird in her hands. “How have you been?”

The sudden quiet that falls over their table makes Korra want to squirm. Could her friends be any more obvious about wanting to hear their conversation?

“Fine,” she says, then clamps her mouth shut and looks down at her hands, balled into fists in her lap. She’s not sure what will come out if she lets herself talk to Asami. She doesn’t want to ruin everyone’s night. Coming here was a mistake, after all, but it’s not like she didn’t know it beforehand.

“What about you, Asami?” Opal asks when it’s clear that Korra isn’t going to.

Korra glances up in time to see Asami blink, frowning in the distinct, subtle way she does when she knows she’s already talked to someone about something but they don’t remember, yet she’s too polite to mention it.

“Fine as well, thank you,” Asami says slowly.

All at once, Korra can’t stay anymore. Hearing Asami’s voice again, seeing her there, right in front of her, close enough to touch, to talk to, to—

Korra clenches her teeth. She’s missed her. She’s missed her so much it makes her want to cry, and now she’s back but it’s not like it used to be; it’s hard and complicated and uncomfortable, and maybe that’s Korra’s fault, in a way, but Asami _is_ the one who left, after all, Korra wasn’t planning on leaving her, ever, she—

When she looks over at Bolin, he’s already looking at her, a pleading expression on his face. She shakes her head and he sighs, then nods.

She doesn’t wait to hear what he comes up with. She gets up so quickly she almost knocks her chair over, and then walks out of Bumi’s bar as fast as she can without making it seem like she’s running.

Bumi’s bar is at the docks, but in the part where it just smells like dead-and-dying fish instead of the sea. Tonight, Korra chokes on it, despite usually being strong against bad smells.

Without really thinking about it, Korra lets her feet take her towards the woods on the other side of town. It’s dark, but out here, the moon is bright enough to see by, and she’s walked the same few paths over and over again since she was small. She doesn’t need to rely on her sight to find her way.

She walks until she reaches her favourite place a little way into the woods, a tiny glade on top of a hill where you can catch glimpses of the town and the ocean through the trees. The town and all the buildings in it are so small, dwarfed all the more by the vastness of the ocean on one side and the depths of a proper, ancient forest on the other.

It’s not like Korra kids herself into thinking she’s the only one who knows about this spot. It’s just that no one knows how much she likes coming here when she needs to think. No one but…

“Korra.”

The sound of the familiar voice makes Korra inadvertently hold her breath. She looks away from the tiny town and the ocean beyond and, sure enough, it really is Asami she finds there, clutching her side and out of breath.

She must have run after her after seeing her disappear in the direction of the glade. Korra refuses to consider the possibility that Asami still knows her well enough to instinctively know where she’d go at a time like this. Because wouldn’t that mean that Korra hasn’t changed at all?

Asami’s phone’s flashlight is moving up and down in time with her heavy breaths. At one point, it shines right into Korra’s eyes and she closes them against the glare.

“Sorry,” Asami mumbles. It sounds like she fumbles around with her phone for a bit, and then the artificial light is gone.

When she doesn’t hear Asami move anymore, Korra opens her eyes again. The light of the moon and the stars is strong enough—for her—to see by, and what she sees is that Asami seems to be quite in disarray. Her hair has leaves stuck in it and her clothes are rumpled. Korra bites down on a smile; it would be too out of place.

“Why are you here, Asami?”

“I—You seemed—I was—You left in such a hurry.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

A pause. “You mean… why I came back at all?”

Korra nods, watching her carefully. Asami lifts a hand to her throat, something Korra knows for a fact she only does when she thinks she might cry. It helps her fight it off.

Some part of Korra still hurts at the realisation, wants to go over to Asami and pull her close and hold her until it’s made up for all the time they’ve been apart, until it feels like they’ve never been apart at all. Another part of her reminds her that Asami probably doesn’t even want her comfort. Why would you leave someone you didn’t want to lose?

“I was always going to come back,” Asami says quietly. “You knew that. I understand that we can’t be… what we were. But can’t we at least be friends?”

Anger bursts alive in Korra’s stomach and burns her previous, tenderer feelings to cinder. She takes a step forward, her hands—fists once more—shaking again.

“I knew?” she spits. “I _knew_? I didn’t know anything, Asami! I still don’t. You just _left_. I get that it was a really complicated and stressful situation, I do, but you could have called, you could have messaged me, you could have… something. You made me feel like—” Her voice breaks; this needs to be said, though, so she forces herself on. “Like I was nothing to you. Which I didn’t think was possible after everything… everything we’d been through. If you’d just _talked_ to me, I would have understood, or tried to understand, anything you said. I—”

Korra shakes her head. While talking, she started walking up and down the glade and now she somehow isn’t able to stop.

“For so long I asked myself what I could have done wrong,” she goes on. “I must have said something or… But I couldn’t think of anything in particular, so I thought I must have missed it. The thought that I wouldn’t even notice doing something that would make you change your opinion of me so drastically…” She takes a deep breath. “Leaving like that was just cruel, Asami. If you wanted to hurt me, well, mission accomplished.”

Finally, she looks back over at Asami, who’s standing there frozen, still as the trees around her. The memory of the two of them watching the sunset and the night sky from this glade, close, smiling, touching, kissing, rises up in Korra’s brain. They couldn’t be more removed from that now, and Korra tries to tamp down on the hurt rising from deep in her stomach. She takes a deep breath.

“Look, it’s good that you’re back. It is,” she repeats, more to convince herself than Asami. “You always said you were happier here. That you wanted to… stay. Now you get to. So… hooray and all that. Just… give me some time, okay? I’m sure we can get back to a good place where we can be friends, but right now I… can’t.”

Asami doesn’t say anything. She’s criticised that about Korra in the past: How Korra would just unload a huge amount of words on her and then not even wait five minutes till Asami’s had time to process everything to give an answer. Instead, Korra would leave, thinking that it hadn’t gone over well. She knows this now, but she still doesn’t have it in her to wait tonight.

“Give me time,” she repeats softly, then heads past Asami, who’s still standing there, unmoving. Suddenly, it feels wrong to leave Asami there like that in the dark with only those as her parting words. She turns back around and adds, as friendly as she knows how, “Good night, Asami. See you around.”

She jogs down the tree-covered hill and all the way back home. The physical exertion feels good after the emotional one from before. All the lights are out in the house when she gets back; her parents must already be in bed.

Looking up at the moon one last time before heading inside, Korra’s overcome with the strange urge to hug it. The moon doesn’t choose to be your constant companion, it just is. It’s not there because it wants to be or doesn’t want to be, it just is. It just is. Sometimes, that’s exactly what people need.

After sending it a smile, Korra goes into the bathroom, brushes her teeth, curses when toothpaste gets onto the nice shirt she’s wearing, then goes into her room, changes, and falls into bed.

She doesn’t know if she can call what she has that night a dream. It’s more like a memory, warped in the way that nothing ever is exactly what it actually is in a dream but you know what, or who, it is anyway.

* * *

The thing is, after Korra’s impromptu confession to Asami all that time ago, she went to that very same glade. It wasn’t the best idea, what without any shoes on, but the forest floor isn’t as unforgiving on bare feet as one might think, if one treads carefully enough. Still hurt, though.

“Ow,” Korra hissed, yet another twig poking her in the foot. A chorus of her “ow”s had been accompanying her ever since she’d entered the forest. However, that didn’t mean she regretted it. It was all worth it when she reached the glade at just the right time to see the sun start its at first slow and then blink-and-you-miss-it-fast descent behind the ocean waves.

She dug her feet into the cold ground, not intending to leave for at least the next ten years. By then, Asami ought to have forgotten what Korra had mindlessly blurted out before.

After everything they’d been through, to potentially lose Asami over this… The thought was unbearable. Not that that outcome was all that likely, since she knew that Asami cared about her, but things would be different now. Awkward. But maybe, if they just held out long enough, they’d get back to a place similar to where Korra had screwed everything up.

She sighed dropped down onto an old, decaying tree trunk, leaning down and resting her head on her knees. There was some kind of rustling in the underbrush, but this was a forest—when wasn’t there.

“Korra.”

Asami’s voice. Korra jumped up as quickly as if she’d been stung by a bee. Since Asami was standing right in front of the setting sun, her face was thrown into shadow, making it almost impossible to read her expression.

“Hello,” Korra said in an uncharacteristically small voice, then cleared her throat and repeated, firmly, “Hello.”

“Why did you run away like that?” Asami asked, and she sounded exasperated.

“I… thought that was obvious.”

“By the time I’d even begun to process and pick apart that torrent of words you’d dropped in my lap, you were already out the door. And you were making progress surprisingly fast for someone without any shoes on.”

“It’s the stubbornness,” Korra said, her words carrying a mixture of both nervousness and pride. “Look, Asami, I—”

“No, Korra.” Asami was shaking her head so vigorously that Korra thought she could hear the creaking of the vertebrae of her neck. “Please let me talk.”

When the pause carried on for too long, Korra realised that Asami was waiting for some kind of answer.

“Oh, um, yes. Of course,” she managed, even though her heart was beating so fast that she half suspected the words wouldn’t make it out of her mouth past her racing pulse.

Asami took a long, deep breath. “There was a lot I wanted to say, but in the end… The crux of the matter is this: I like you too, Korra.”

“What’s that?” Korra was blinking so fast that her vision went all wonky.

“I like you too, Korra,” Asami said, and the warmth and affection in her voice made Korra forget to breathe for a moment.

“As a… friend?”

“Yes, as a friend,” Asami replied, but before Korra’s heart could drop into her stomach, she continued, “and also in a way that’s altogether different.”

“So… love?” burst out of her before she could apply her brain-to-mouth filter that was barely hanging on anyway. The sudden urge to bang her head against a tree trunk was hard to fight off. ‘So… love?’ had to be the pinnacle of all the times Korra had put her foot in her mouth that day. And yet… Did her ears deceive her or did Asami’s breath actually catch?

“Yes.” Asami paused for so long that Korra thought that was all she was going to say, until: “I’m in love with you too, Korra. I have been for a while now. I didn’t… I thought it’d be best if I kept those feelings to myself, but…”

“Then I went and blurted them out,” Korra continued and rubbed the back of her neck in embarrassment. Then she blinked. When had Asami gotten so close? Korra could actually discern her expression now—her eyes seemed to be shining with joy.

“You always had more guts than me.” As if to punctuate her words, Asami put a hand on Korra’s stomach. Korra reflexively sucked in air. Asami’s hand moved up and down with her breaths, gentle and warm, and Korra was surprised her spirit hadn’t left her body yet to escape the turmoil of emotions going on inside of her.

“I beg to differ,” Korra said, her voice slightly croaky. She cleared her throat again. “You might just be the bravest person I know.”

At that point, Korra had given up on cringing at the words coming out of her mouth and decided to just go with it.

Asami smiled, and, without thinking, Korra lifted a hand to touch one of her dimples. When Asami’s smile dropped as a result, Korra swiftly tried to withdraw her hand, only for Asami to place one of her own on top of it, keeping it there.

Slowly, Asami lifted her other hand off Korra’s stomach, which suddenly felt like the North Pole at the loss of her warmth. That cold sensation was quickly gone and replaced by Asami placing the hand on Korra’s neck instead, feeling her pulse with slightly shaky fingers.

“Your heart is beating really fast,” she said, and the soft wonder in her voice made Korra bite down on the words, ‘Gee, I wonder why!’

“That’s because you’re so close to me,” was out of Korra’s mouth before she could even think it. She almost couldn’t believe it; did she actually manage to be some semblance of smooth on a day full of awkward blurtings?

Asami’s snort was answer enough. “I can’t believe you just said that.”

“Why not?” Korra stuck out her chin, feeling stubbornness bubble up in her chest. “It’s true, after all.”

With a hum, Asami started lightly tapping her fingers along to the rhythm of Korra’s pulse. The feeling of that on her sensitive neck made Korra’s hand—that Asami was still holding to her cheek—twitch. At that, Asami looked away from her tapping fingers and up into Korra’s eyes. They both swallowed audibly at the same time.

Carefully, Asami lifted her hand away from Korra’s neck and, with only the slightest hesitation, touched her fingers to Korra’s lips. Her gaze dropped down to her fingers again. Korra might as well have been a stone statue at that point; she felt completely frozen.

“I want to…” Asami trailed off and bit down on her bottom lip. She looked into Korra’s eyes again and her gaze was questioning, searching. Korra had no idea how on earth she couldn’t tell how much she wanted to kiss her, but she decided to simply clear up any doubts Asami might be having by taking matters into her own hands.

Reaching up, she took Asami’s hand in hers and moved it away from her mouth. Then, she coaxed Asami’s other hand away from her cheek with _her_ other hand. Really, their hands had been doing so much in such a short amount of time that it was a miracle there were only four of them. Asami was watching her, eyes wide, seemingly holding her breath.

Everything might as well have been in slow-motion with how long it took Korra to close the distance between them. But she couldn’t fight off the irrational worry that if she rushed this, if she charged in with all of her usual vigour, this moment would shatter and they could never get it back.

In the end, it was Asami who leaned forward and cleared the last bit of empty air, until her lips touched Korra’s. They both immediately pulled back to take a gasping breath only to move towards each other again a second later.

If hearts could leap out of bodies and into the hands of the person one loves, Korra would have liked to think that her heart would have been glowing brightly in Asami’s gentle grip. And she would have liked to think it was the same the other way around.

* * *

When Korra wakes up in the morning, she feels a single tear roll down her cheek and onto her pillow. She wipes it away and frowns at it. It’s not like she’s sad or feels like crying; this is more like one of those tears caused by the wind or staring at a screen for too long. It burns a little.

What’s even the point of sleeping if you still feel tired when you wake up? Korra groans and rolls onto her stomach, burying her face in her pillow until her need to breathe makes her turn her head to the side.

She feels exhausted in every way but the physical. The prospect of just staying in bed all day would seem tempting if it weren’t for the fact that her stomach is already making all sorts of bubbling noises to show her exactly what it thinks of that idea.

A knock on the door makes Korra roll onto her back.

“Korra?”

She frowns. “Bolin? What are you doing here?”

“Lovely to see you too.”

“If by ‘you’ you mean my door and by ‘lovely’ you mean uncomfortable, then that sounds about right. So what is it?”

“I’m checking up on you, of course. Come have breakfast—I brought Mako’s blackcurrant jam.”

Korra perks up. Mako’s jam-making talents were a bit of a surprise when she first found out about them. She quickly learned that if you annoy Mako about it enough, he eventually makes you a batch.

“You did? Is he here too?”

“No, he and Opal are with—” Bolin breaks off so suddenly it almost felt like Korra can hear a record scratch. She sighs. He’s terribly bad at coming up with lies on the spot, except he never seems to realise it. “He and Opal are with Suyin, practicing for the new show.”

“Yes, since Mako is such a known and graceful dancer.”

Bolin sighs. “Come on, Korra. Come out of your cave.”

“Don’t call it a cave,” Korra grumbles, futilely kicking at the air.

“Cave, cave, cave, cave, cave. Cave. Come out of your cave, cave, cave.”

He actually started singing it at some point; it sounds like he’s really getting into it. Korra shivers at the memory of the time Bolin was convinced he’d be a world-famous opera singer. There was nothing she could plug her ears with that could protect her from the sounds he was capable of belting out.

“Fine! Just please stop.”

“You got it.” Bolin sounds way too chipper; Korra wouldn’t put it past him that he planned the whole thing.

She leans over the edge of her bed, places her hands on the floor and does a somersault over to her dresser. Rubbing at the pressure point on her head, she randomly opens its drawers and grabs the first things she sees.

When she joins Bolin in the kitchen five minutes later, he’s already popped Korra’s bread slices in the toaster. His own are on his plate; he prefers his bread soft over crispy.

Korra’s mom, Senna, is sitting on the sill of their biggest window in one corner of the kitchen. It’s her favourite spot in the mornings because the sun shines right on you at a time when it isn’t even too intense in summer.

“So…” Bolin starts, and Korra grits her teeth. She knew this was coming. “What happened yesterday? She followed you, didn’t she? When she came back, she seemed…” Bolin trails off, apparently unable to find the right word, but his expression says enough.

Korra turns the tap on and lets it run until it’s cold enough. Then she fills her glass and downs it in three gulps.

“Pace yourself, darling,” Senna chimes in from her window spot without looking up from her book. “It’s not good for you to drink so fast, especially such cold water.”

“Yes,” Korra says, even though she doesn’t intend to change anything about her methods of water consumption. “You can say her name, you know,” she says to Bolin. “It’s not cursed, it’s not forbidden. It’s not less awkward if you don’t say it. Quite the opposite, actually.”

“Sorry,” he mumbles. “So. What happened with Asami?”

“Nothing good.”

Bolin rolls his eyes. “Way to be dramatic.” His tone turns more serious when he says, “Won’t you go easy on her, Korra? You didn’t see Asami. This is just as hard on her. I get it that she’s in the wrong here or whatever, but she’s not evil. She’s not someone to fight or punish.”

At that, Korra’s throat feels like someone took a ribbon and pulled it tight around it—heavy and stifling. “I don’t want to—” She runs a hand through her hair. “I don’t want to _hurt_ her. I just don’t know how to be with her right now without it hurting me.”

“Korra…”

Korra drops down onto one of their comfortable kitchen chairs. “I’m not even angry anymore. I’m just sad. Sad it turned out like this, when it was—It doesn’t matter anymore that she never called or wrote to explain what was going on. It doesn’t. But I’m confused about what I’m feeling and I’m confused about where to go from here. It hurts to see her and it hurts not to see her and—I really hate this.”

“Korra…” Bolin says again, his voice soft. He’s gotten up and is standing next to Korra now. Gingerly, he places his hand on her shoulder, and Korra doesn’t know if she wants to shake it off or grab it and hold onto it like it might be able to free her from this chaos.

“But she did leave you a letter, darling.” Her mom’s voice sounds so bewildered that it takes a while for her words to sink in.

When they do, Korra and Bolin whirl around to face Senna at the same time, speaking in unison when they say, “What?”

* * *

Korra and Bolin stare at Senna as she calmly and ever-so-slowly brews herself a cup of herbal tea. When she finally sits down with it, they both lean forward, their breaths caught. And yet, she still doesn’t start speaking. Korra worries that she’s going to start tearing out her hair in impatience any moment now.

Her mom moves this way and that in her chair.

“_Mother_,” Korra finally says, breaking the spell of silence that had settled over them for the past couple of minutes.

“I have to be comfortable to tell a story,” Senna says serenely.

“It’s not a story; it’s something that actually happened!”

“Darling, a lot of the time there’s not that much of a difference.” Her mom settles down and nods. “Very well, this will do.”

However, instead of starting to finally tell them what she meant by ‘She left you a letter’, Senna takes a slurping sip of tea.

Giving up, Korra lets her forehead rest on the table and stares down at her own legs and feet.

“I remember that day well,” Senna says, and Korra perks back up again. “Asami came here, looking so distraught that it worried me. She simply brushed off my concern and said everything was all right.

“The news about her father hadn’t officially broken yet, but she must have already known. She seemed desperate to talk to you. I remember how crestfallen she was when I told her you were out on our boat with your father.

“After a moment’s pause, she asked me if she could borrow pen and paper to leave you a message, and I agreed, of course. I’ve never seen someone write like that, like they had to fit every word possible into their last minutes alive. I remember worrying you wouldn’t be able to read it, she was writing so fast.

“Finally, she was done, and she handed the folded letter to me and asked me to please give it to you. Then she was out the door before I could say much else. I took the letter to your room and placed it on your bed. When you got home, I wanted to tell you about it immediately, but you rushed into the shower so fast… And then your father distracted me.” Korra pulls a face. Unperturbed, her mom continues, “You didn’t mention it later or ask about it, so I thought you didn’t want to talk about it, and I left it alone.”

Korra looks over at Bolin, her world feeling all topsy-turvy after finding out that something she thought she knew to be true for the past couple of years is actually wrong. Bolin, however, is staring at Senna, entranced. Korra huffs, but there’s no denying that her mom is a skilled storyteller; she gets that from Korra’s grandparents.

“There was no letter on my bed, nothing,” Korra says, shaking her head, a frown on her face. “I don’t get it. Are you sure you didn’t just dream that?”

Her mom laughs in that clear, bell-like way of hers. She cups Korra’s cheek in her hand. “Yes, I’m sure. My dreams are never that interesting.”

“Where could it have gone?” Bolin chimes in, apparently having shaken off the story’s spell.

Senna hums, then sits up. “Come to think of it, you left your window open that day. I didn’t close it either, since you’d still left the pile—or should I say mountain?—of dirty laundry on your floor, so your room could use the fresh air.”

“Mom,” Korra says, fighting off embarrassment.

“This could mean,” her mom says, waving her off, “that maybe the wind blew the letter off the bed.”

The three of them—Korra, Bolin, and Senna—sit frozen for several seconds, then all get up at once. Korra is the fastest and reaches her room first. She stares at her bed where, apparently, the letter in question must once have lain.

“Where could it have gone?” Bolin asks, who bent over to check the floor and is now looking at everything upside-down.

Turning on the spot, Korra looks around at all the possible places the letter could have been blown. Her gaze sweeps past Bolin—now on all fours—checking under her bed, and past her mom picking up and folding a shirt Korra left on the floor, until finally, it lands on her dresser. Like a stone sinking to the bottom of a lake, the certainty that that must be where the wind blew the sheet of paper settles slowly but surely in her gut.

Bolin seems to have gotten what she’s going for because he gets up and helps her lift her dresser away. And there, among a veritable town of dust bunnies, is a neatly folded piece of paper.

“See, Korra,” Senna says, “if you moved your furniture around every now and again to clean underneath and behind it, like I tell you to, you would have found the letter long ago.”

Unable to look away from the piece of paper, Korra distractedly says, “Yes, you’re right, as you almost always are. Is this really the time, though?”

Senna huffs a laugh. “Perhaps not.”

Carefully, as if it could disintegrate if she handled it too roughly, Korra picks up the letter and shakes the dust off of it. Bolin starts coughing and heads to the open window to take a gasping breath, after which Senna takes his arm and gently pulls on it to make him follow her out of the room. She closes the door behind them, but Korra barely notices they’re gone.

Her hands are shaking again. Immune to dust after years of exposure, Korra takes a deep breath, swallows heavily, and then unfolds the piece of paper.

Asami’s squiggly and yet somehow also neat handwriting meets her gaze. The only way she can maybe tell the hurry her mom described Asami being in is the way that Asami didn’t manage to keep her letters a similar size. They’re like hills or waves, with crests and valleys.

It takes a moment until Korra feels ready to actually read the words, and when she finally starts, she’s instantly riveted.

_Dear Korra_,

_I have to leave. I don’t want to, please believe me. I need to._

_You’ll find out soon enough, but I think you should hear it from me: My father was arrested. I don’t think he’s at all who I thought he was and I don’t know what to do with that information. I wish I could talk to you about it._

_His company is in shambles, and somehow, I’m the one they’re turning to to try and salvage things. I’m not sure it’s something worth saving. At the very least, I’ll figure out something meaningful to do with the assets it has left._

_I don’t know how long this is going to take, but I won’t let myself come back until I’ve finished it, left all of it behind for good and can really settle down here. With you, if you’ll still have me then. And I won’t let myself talk to you or see you either, because I don’t think I’d have it in me to stay there and finish things then._

_Korra, I’ve never felt for anyone as strongly as I feel for you. If you reached out to me, I would come to you. I couldn’t help myself. So please don’t contact me, Korra, please don’t. Even though it feels impossible not to talk to you for however long this takes when it’s only been less than a day and I already miss you more than I can bear. But I need to do this. I think I won’t be able to feel truly free otherwise._

_Know that I’ll be working all the more diligently because the reward is that I get to come back. That I get to see you again._

_I truly love you, Korra. I’ve really never loved anyone so much. Please take care, please be well, until we meet again and beyond. And please tell the others I’m sorry about having to leave so abruptly and I can’t wait to come back._

_All my love,_

_Asami_

Korra plonks down on her bed.

“Dummy,” she whispers, furiously wiping at the tears running down her face, futilely trying to stop them from falling. “You’re such a big dummy, Asami.”

And then, just like that, she’s sobbing.

For so long, Asami leaving her behind like that was too painful to confront. It was easier to let the hurt masquerade as bitterness and anger than to actually face it and work through it. After all, it seemed like Asami left without a second thought, like she left without even thinking about how Korra would feel about it.

But now… this. The sadness Korra started feeling after meeting Asami the night before adds onto all the buried sadness from their time apart and expresses itself through water coming out of her eyes.

Korra presses down on her chest in a useless attempt to push the ache out, or at least to smother it. Well, sometimes the best way out really is through, and so Korra lets herself feel it all.

When her sobs have become nothing but deep breaths and her eyes remain dry, Korra gets up, sluggish yet determined. She’s ready to face things head-on now, and that makes her feel more like herself than she has in a while.

* * *

“You look…” Mako starts, then trails off, apparently unable to come up with a good end to that sentence.

“Lovely as always,” Korra croaks, her voice slightly rough from crying. Pointedly, she clears her throat. “Are you the guardian of the door now? Do I have to answer some riddle so you’ll let me pass?”

Mako relaxes the arms he’s crossed in front of his chest and looks from side to side. Apparently, he wasn’t aware that he was standing in the doorway to Opal’s place, making it impossible to enter—or leave, for that matter.

“Very funny,” he says, dry in a way no one else can ever quite manage. With a quick look over his shoulder, he continues, “Wait here. I’ll go in and announce your presence.”

Korra can’t help it; the eye-roll happens automatically. “Yes, I shall, and kindly do tell them that I do so wish they would bestow an audience upon me.”

“Korra, talking like that has never been, nor will it ever be, funny or witty.”

“Agree to disagree,” Korra says, with the express purpose of annoying Mako.

He opens his mouth to argue, then closes it again, holding back for once. After shaking his head and shooting her a glare for good measure, he heads inside and closes the door behind him.

Unable to hold still, Korra turns her torso this way as if she were warming up for a sprint. She stares at the door while biting down on her bottom lip, willing it to open. When it does, it’s Opal on the other side of it.

“Her Excellency will see you now,” she says with a little bow.

“You get me.” Korra squeezes her shoulder on the way past. She feels like her nerves are pronounced enough to be recognised as their own entity. From now on, whenever she goes somewhere, the two of them will have to be introduced as Korra and her Nerves.

After taking off her shoes, she sees Mako leaning on the wall in the hallway. He nods at the living room, which means ‘She’s in there.’ Korra pokes his tummy in thanks on the way past, and he snorts.

Taking a slow breath, Korra opens the living room door, steps in, and shuts it again behind her.

When her eyes find Asami on the couch, Korra has to swallow heavily to keep down the tears threatening to rise again. They already had their moment; now it’s time to talk things through.

Asami just looks at her with a complicated expression; Korra realises it’s up to her to start talking first.

“I found your letter,” she says.

Asami blinks, confusion plain on her face.

“My mom put it on my bed but the wind blew it under my dresser before I could ever read it and my mom always tells me to move my furniture and clean behind and under it but I never did that because I’ve become immune to dust so I don’t really care and I didn’t mention the letter so my mom didn’t mention it either and that’s why I didn’t know it existed till this morning and… yeah.” Korra’s takes a gasping breath; what did she even just say? It all burst out at once in a chaotic jumble like so often when talking to Asami about anything feelings-related. “That’s basically it.”

Asami’s blinks have increased in frequency. “What?” she manages. Then, with a jolt, she stands up. “Wait, what?”

“I never saw your letter until today, Asami. I always thought you’d just left. That you didn’t care that much after all. About me.” A pause. “About us.”

Realisation dawns on Asami’s face. “So that’s why you said those things last night.”

“Yeah…” Korra kneads the back of her neck with her hand. “Sorry about that.”

“No,” Asami says, shaking her head. “It’s okay. I’m the one who’s sorry. When you weren’t there that day, I panicked a bit and was convinced the letter was the best solution. Not the smartest move in retrospect, I’ll admit.”

“No kidding. Asami, why didn’t you want to stay in touch? I tried to call you so many times, until finally it couldn’t even connect anymore because you’d changed your number. It’s… I felt…” Korra’s voice cracks and she hurriedly clears her throat. Asami’s pained expression isn’t exactly helping either.

“I thought…” The unsure note to Asami’s voice makes Korra feel even more frustrated.

“I know you wrote that it would have been impossible to stay away, but we could have done it like when you were studying. Messaged each other. Seen each other every couple of months or maybe even weeks. Stuff like that.”

“It wasn’t the same anymore as back then,” Asami says, shaking her head. “I’d come to love you more than I ever thought possible. You don’t know how painful it was to leave you. I—”

“I do know,” Korra interrupts, earnestly and vehemently. Then, more quietly, “I do know.”

Asami takes a shaky breath and sits down again. “I’m sorry, Korra. At the time, I thought it was the right decision to make. I couldn’t trust myself to go through with it if I kept being reminded that the alternative was being with you. A huge part of me didn’t want to do it, wanted to say, ‘To hell with it all!’ And yet I couldn’t just leave it like that. I knew I would have regretted it later.”

They stay silent for a while. Korra clenches and unclenches her fists, unsure what to do with her hands; Asami takes deep breaths and rubs at her chest. Bizarrely, that makes Korra think of someone applying tiger balm to help with bronchitis, like every rub takes a little bit of the pain away. She shakes her head.

“You know that if I had found the letter that day,” Korra starts, and Asami looks back up at her, “I would have followed you to the city to talk some sense into you. Maybe I would have moved there with you for however long it took.”

Asami’s lower lip starts wobbling, and her breathing becomes shallow. “You love it here, Korra. I wouldn’t have wanted you to leave your life behind for me.”

“Well, I loved you too, Asami. Just as much. I could have lived here a couple of weeks, then with you a couple of weeks, and so on.”

Now Asami’s frantically wiping at her eyes even though they still seem dry, as if terrified a tear might fall. She tries to huff a laugh; it falls flat. “Very realistic employment-wise.”

Korra sticks her chin out. “I would’ve figured something out.”

A tear does fall from Asami’s eye then. She catches it with her fingers and stares at its wetness for a moment. Then she looks at Korra again and her wobbly smile makes Korra’s chest constrict.

“I was s-so scared… you’d f-follow me,” Asami manages in between gasping breaths, wiping at her eyes again. “But I also wanted you to so b-badly.”

Giving up on catching the tears streaming from her eyes, Asami buries her face in her hands. Her voice is muffled when she says, “And yet, saying g-… good-bye to you… I knew I couldn’t do it m-more than once.”

Once again, like all those years ago, Korra isn’t quite sure what to do, which form of comfort would be welcome. In the end, she lets herself go with her first instinct and sits down next to Asami, carefully wrapping an arm around her.

Asami stiffens. Korra’s about to draw her arm back when Asami twists into her, burying her head against her shoulder and curling an arm around Korra’s waist.

Before she knows it, Korra starts sniffling too, despite already having cried earlier—apparently, there sometimes simply isn’t such a thing as ‘all cried out’. The two of them end up awkwardly rocking back and forth, Korra holding Asami steady, Asami moving a hand up and down Korra’s back in an attempt at comfort, both of them sobbing.

There’s a knock on the door that neither of them really registers, and then Mako’s sticking his head inside the room. He must have lost rock, paper, scissors with Opal.

“Do you…” he starts, then trails off when he catches sight of the state they’re in. “Nope. Okay. Sorry.”

He hastily pulls his head back and the door closes.

There’s a huff against Korra’s shoulder, then another, followed by a proper chuckle that escalates into a full-blown laugh in the blink of an eye. Unable to help herself, Korra joins in, and then she and Asami are shaking from laughter instead of from tears. Emotions should really learn some courtesy and give their recipients a buffer period before one takes over for another.

With one last sniff, Asami separates herself from Korra’s shoulder. She looks at the damp patch she left on Korra’s shirt and pulls a face.

“Sorry about that.”

Korra shrugs. “It’s basically like being sprayed with sea water. Salt and all that.”

At that, Asami gives her the strangest look which finally twists into a lopsided smile. “I missed you, Korra. I don’t think there are words to accurately tell you how much.”

With a hum, Korra pulls a strand of hair off her own cheek that got stuck there because of her tears. “Ditto.”

“So… does that mean we can be friends again?” Asami asks carefully.

_Friends._ Korra swallows down her disappointment and pretends she never felt it in the first place. Of course it’s impossible for them to go back to the way things were almost three years ago, for both of them. And yet Korra isn’t going to lie and say she’s not still at least a little in love with Asami, because she is.

On an impulse, Korra grabs Asami’s hand and squeezes it.

“Yes, Asami,” she says, “we can.”

Something complicated happens on Asami’s face then. But before Korra has time to think about it, Bolin bursts into the room, followed by Opal and Mako.

“Yay!” Bolin claps, a grin on his face.

Korra glares at him and lets go of Asami’s hand. “When did you get here?”

He waves her off. “Would I miss your proper reunion? The moment when there’s finally no tension between anyone anymore?”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Opal stage whispers at him, pointedly looking from Korra’s glare to Bolin’s grin.

A loud sigh brings them all up short. “Can we just go and grab some lunch now?” Mako asks, petulant in his patented, harmless way.

“You’re ruining a _moment_,” Bolin responds, only half-joking, and pokes his brother in the chest.

Mako raises an eyebrow at him. “Look who’s talking.”

“Boys,” Opal says, raising her hands, a palm facing each of them.

Tuning out their bickering, Korra turns back towards Asami. When they make eye contact, Asami looks away quickly.

“Yes,” Asami interrupts Opal, Bolin and Mako, who are now discussing what, exactly, qualifies as a _moment_. She gets up and flips her hair over her shoulder, just like she always used to do. Korra’s hand twitches, and she closes her other hand around it to disguise it. “Let’s have lunch.”

Asami walks out of the room without looking back at Korra once. Korra exhales shakily. For all that they’re supposedly ‘friends again’ now, things don’t really seem in any way relaxed or normal, whatever that may mean.

Maybe holding back on expressing her true feelings was a mistake, after all; or maybe then things would have just been a different kind of awkward.

* * *

“Do you think I should tell Asami how I really feel?”

Korra waits for a reply for a couple of seconds, then lets Squiggly drop back onto her chest with a sigh.

She isn’t quite sure anymore what Squiggly was supposed to become when she and her parents made it together when she was small. All she knows is that now, one of its tendrils—squiggles—turns out to be long enough to hit her in the face when Squiggly bounces off her chest and back onto it again.

Squiggly doesn’t even have a body. It’s just an amalgamation of squiggles in a variety of colours. Her own little rainbow that isn’t even all that nice to cuddle and yet is often all the comfort she needs.

She’s been neglecting Squiggly a bit over the past few years, but blasts from the past simply seem to be a thing at the moment.

“I love you, Squiggly,” Korra says, lifting it up again. “See? That was easy.”

Korra pretends to listen.

“Hmm, what’s that? ‘But I’m an inanimate object and Asami’s a real person,’ you say? Well, let me tell you, I can still say it. Here, I’ll prove it to you: I love you, A—” Korra has to clear her throat for reasons totally unrelated to what she’s trying to say. “I love you, A—”

Squiggly, as ever, remains silent, and Korra sighs again. “You’re right. I was kidding myself.”

The facts are these: the way Asami cut off all contact for almost three years wasn’t the best move; she was always planning on coming back; going by the letter, she was maybe hoping she and Korra could pick up where they left off; and yet, a couple of weeks ago, she asked Korra if they could be friends again and didn’t mention anything about romance.

“The question is,” Korra starts quietly, “do you still love me?”

“What’s that about love I hear?”

Korra sits bolt upright. Bolin knocks on the door once and enters without waiting for a reply. Before Korra can begin to talk, he lifts his hand.

“I can see it in your face. You’re thinking, ‘Him again?’ And let me just ask you: Didn’t you know that I’m your DBF, or Designated Best Friend?”

“Nice to see you’re keeping up the tradition of inventing bogus titles for yourself.”

Bolin bows with a flourish. “At your service.”

Korra pats the spot next to her on the bed. After skilfully evading a pile of shirts on the floor on his way over, Bolin settles down there.

“What’s this about, my dear DBF?” Korra asks.

For once, Bolin actually seems hesitant. “Don’t you know?”

With a groan, Korra lets herself fall backward on her bed. “Asami.”

“Bullseye.”

Korra shrugs, which is a little harder to pull off while lying down, but she’s stubborn enough to make it work.

“We’re friends again,” she says. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

Bolin pokes her on the nose. “Don’t deflect. What _we_ wanted was only for both of your obvious wounds to start healing.”

“Completely selflessly.”

“Fine,” Bolin says. “We also wanted things to be less awkward for us.”

Korra lazily lifts her hand to point at him. “There you go.”

“But,” Bolin continues, pointing right back at her, “things are more awkward now than ever.”

After covering her face with Squiggly, Korra replies, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He scoffs. “Yes, of course, that’s why you’re hiding your face.”

Korra sits back up and lets Squiggly fall into her lap. “Fine. Things are awkward. You’ll learn to live with it.”

“But they don’t have to be,” Bolin persists, then sighs when there’s no change in her stubborn expression. “Honestly, why do you two seem even sadder and more uncomfortable now than before?”

Despite herself, Korra feels the sting of those words. It’s not like she hasn’t noticed how Asami is avoiding spending time alone with her any way possible. She thought things could get more like they used to be between them now that they’ve resolved some stuff and decided to be friends again. Apparently not.

“You’d have to ask Asami,” Korra says, shrugging. “She’s the one avoiding me.”

“Korra, I’m just going to be blunt. You’re still in love with her, aren’t you?”

She freezes, then splutters. “What? What gave you that idea?”

“The fact that you sigh wistfully every time you catch sight of her,” Bolin says drily.

“I do not, and I am not,” Korra says with a little too much emphasis on every word. “After I basically thought the worst of her for the better part of three years? As if. I am _not_ that pathetic.”

He leans forward and looks straight at her. “Then why are you avoiding eye contact with me?” Then he pokes her in the side. “Also, you’re not calling yourself pathetic on my watch.”

“I’m not calling myself pathetic. The whole point of what I just said is that I’m not pathetic because I’m _not_ not in love with Asami.”

With a smirk, Bolin leans back and says, “You said not not.”

Korra blinks. “No, I didn’t.”

“You said, ‘I’m not not in love with Asami,’ meaning you are.”

“What?” Korra shakes her head. “Don’t play mind games with me.”

“Korra.” Bolin sighs and rubs his temples. “Why are you making this harder on yourself than it needs to be? You obviously have some romantic feelings for Asami left over, and so does she. Just… do something about it already.”

All of a sudden, Korra finds it hard to breathe. “You’re wrong,” she says, and swallows heavily. “Asami clearly stated that she wants to be friends.”

This time, it’s Bolin’s turn to shake his head. “I don’t trust either of you to correctly interpret what the other one says anymore. You have a terrible track record. You two are the queens of miscommunication and dumb assumptions and equally dumb rash actions.”

“Hey,” Korra grumbles without any heat to it. He’s exaggerating like so often, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a—albeit very small—point.

“Would you please just talk to her and tell her how you feel?”

“I can’t.” Korra shifts slightly away from Bolin. “I don’t want to make her feel uncomfortable. Again,” she adds, remembering her disastrous first confession all those years ago.

Bolin actually groans at that. “Trust me, she already is. As are we all. How much worse can it possibly get?”

Korra glares at him. “You do realise that you’ve just jinxed it.”

“My bad, I take it back,” he says, lifting his hands placatingly. “But seriously, wouldn’t you rather get it off your chest and know for sure once and for all?”

“That… does make a bit of sense,” Korra allows. Then she falters. “If Asami really does feel that way, though, why didn’t she just say something? She definitely offered to be friends again.”

“Korra,” Bolin says and puts his hands on her shoulders, “I don’t know how often I need to say this, but you two are terrible at communicating.”

“But—”

“Look, the night before your talk, you weren’t exactly happy to see her. Then she found out about the whole letter mishap and that you’ve basically been resenting her for almost three years. I mean, if I were in her shoes, I wouldn’t exactly be professing my love to you at that point, because I’d think you’d reject me.”

Korra raises her eyebrows. “You know you would.”

“Okay, fine, I would. I’m an exception, though. As Asami, I’d probably bide my time and maybe wait for things between us to get to a good place again.”

“Then why is she avoiding spending time alone with me in any and every possible way?”

“Because, and I repeat, you’re both terrible at all of this,” Bolin says simply, like that explains everything. And maybe, just maybe, it does. A bit. Korra gives in.

“Okay, fine. I’ll try and talk to her later. No promises, though.”

Bolin encloses one of her hands in both of his. “That’s all we ask for. Please release us from this awkward tension.”

“If we’re the queens of miscommunication, then you’re the queen of being dramatic.”

“And proud of it,” he says with a grin.

Korra relaxes her grip on Squiggly which had taken on a vice-like quality. She has no idea what to say to Asami or how to broach the subject, but knowing her mouth, it’s bound to run away with her anyway, so she might as well give up on preparing for the whole thing.

* * *

“Okay,” Jinora says, holding up the image in question. “Aunt Kya, what do you see in this inkblot?”

Kya tilts her head to the side. “A demon.”

Mako groans and covers his face with his hand. “You can’t just say that every time.”

“Says who?” Kya asks with a shrug. “My chances of being right increase every time I say it.”

“I don’t think ‘demon’ is a possible answer for any of these,” Jinora says with a thoughtful frown, looking at the back of several cards.

“Jinora’s cheating!” Ikki calls out.

“Am not,” Jinora says, putting the cards down and instantly flushing. “I would never. I’m only trying to prove my hypothesis.”

“If you’re cheating, I’m cheating too,” Ikki declares and picks some cards up only to discard them again immediately. “This one’s a ship according to most people. This one’s a moose. This one…”

“Stop it,” Jinora hisses, taking the cards away from her sister. “You’re sixteen now, not twelve anymore. Act like it.”

“No fighting, you two,” Pema says from her spot in the ‘Activity’-playing circle.

They’re all sitting on the biggest quilt Korra’s ever seen—maybe because several people in town made _a_ quilt and then combined them all into one gigantic quilt—and small groups of people are playing all sorts of games. Korra, Asami and a few other are in the non-playing group; Korra mostly because she’s trying to find a good time to talk to Asami alone. Bolin keeps shooting her what he thinks are furtive looks and giving her a random thumbs up at times.

At the thought of what she intends to talk to Asami about, Korra can’t keep her face from heating up. When she tries to stealthily look over at Asami, she finds that, once again, Asami is already looking at her—in a quizzical sort of manner this time.

“Are you all right?” Asami asks her.

Korra nods and forces a smile onto her face. Judging by Asami’s deepening frown, it doesn’t have the intended effect.

When Meelo runs past them, he stops and doubles back. Bending down to look at Korra’s face more closely, he asks, “Why are you grimacing? Did someone step on your foot?”

“Meelo, could you come here for a second?” Tenzin calls over to them from where he’s playing chess with Lin.

“You cannot always ask your son to make your moves for you,” Lin says, her arms crossed in front of her chest. “Which one of you am I playing against?”

Tenzin shrugs. “Look at it this way: If you win, you’ll have defeated two people at once on your own.”

“Interesting,” Lin says, and although her face doesn’t show much of a reaction, the way she relaxes her arms slightly and leans forward means that her interest truly is piqued.

“See you later,” Meelo says to Korra and runs over to his father.

Deciding that now is as good a time as ever, Korra takes a deep breath and turns to Asami. “Would you like to take a walk with me?”

Immediately, Asami’s expression shutters slightly and she starts looking from side to side as if searching for an exit.

“I… um, was actually thinking of joining in on the next round of Jenga.”

She gets up and smiles down ruefully at Korra—or rather, at somewhere to the left of her, avoiding eye contact.

Ignoring this less than ideal start to things, Korra lets her instincts take over and reaches out for Asami’s hand. Asami freezes and stares down at where their hands are touching like it’s the scene of a crime.

“Just for a moment?” Korra adds, not quite able to keep a note of desperation from creeping into her tone.

Tearing her gaze away from their hands, Asami looks Korra right in the eyes. Korra’s breath catches—hopefully inaudibly—and as if on cue, both of their hands twitch at the same time. She can see Asami swallow and lightly digs the nails of her free hand into her palm to try to keep her breathing under control and her nervousness from overwhelming her.

“All right,” Asami says quietly.

“Oh,” Korra breathes out, and then clears her throat. “Okay.”

She gets up as well and then they head off away from the world’s biggest quilt that it takes several people to carry.

They walk in silence, until eventually Asami clears her throat. Korra looks over at her questioningly and follows her gaze down to where she’s still holding Asami’s hand.

“Oh,” she says again. She lets go of Asami’s hand like she’s burnt herself on it. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

The whole thing is so awkward and stilted that Korra simply wants to tilt her head back and shout at the sky to get rid of the tension in the air. But since she’s a—partly—rational adult, she begrudgingly refrains.

“Look, Asami,” Korra starts, and here comes her foot-in-mouth affliction, apparently, because she goes on with, “I get a feeling like you’re avoiding me. Which I get, I mean, we haven’t seen each other in a long time and our reunion was less than ideal, to put it lightly. Also, we were really close before and now there’s this big gap in our knowledge of each other and maybe we’ve changed a lot and maybe we’re not as compatible as friends as we used to be and there’s all this complicated stuff between us and it’s just awkward, isn’t it, I mean, Bolin’s told me he and the others think it’s awkward, and I think it’s awkward, and you probably do too.”

While she takes a gasping breath, Asami fits more blinks into a second than she’s ever seen anyone do.

“And while I do get why you might be avoiding me,” Korra continues, “it also hurts my feelings a bit, you know? Because I like you just as I’ve always liked you—well, maybe not in the very beginning, but if we’re all allowed to pretend one phase of our lives didn’t exist, that one would be my choice. And that’s not all, you know, because, you know, I…”

Korra’s words catch in her throat and she feels dangerously close to tears. She is _not_ crying in front of Asami again so soon. She doesn’t have any intention of trying to fight Bolin for his crown as the most dramatic person in their group.

“I still love you, Korra,” Asami blurts out, and Korra, faced with her own methods, can only blink. “I never stopped. I had a picture of you on my desk at work and on my wall in my apartment and always ready to look at on my phone for when missing you became too much to bear. And I don’t know if that’s creepy, I’m sorry if it is. I just… wanted to see you so badly the entire time and I couldn’t wait to see you again. To _be_ with you again, in every way we’ve ever been together. Well, maybe not the way we were trapped in that cave for hours that time without any light, but all the others.”

Korra opens her mouth, completely flabbergasted, then closes it again with difficulty.

“When I got back,” Asami continues, “I wanted to come see you right away, but then I got nervous. What if your feelings for me had changed? I knew by then that the letter was by no means an ideal good-bye. I thought it would be best if we met when it was all of us in case things got a bit awkward. And then… it felt like you hated me.”

Asami’s voice breaks on that last part and Korra’s heart breaks with it.

“I never hated you,” Korra says softly. “I never could, not even when I thought you’d left me without a word of good-bye like I’d meant nothing to you.”

Asami steps forward and takes Korra’s hands in hers. “I’m so sorry you had to carry that bitterness with you all that time. That was honestly, truly the last thing I wanted.”

“I know that now.” Korra can’t help sounding choked-up and she doesn’t even care anymore. “I still love you too, Asami, and...”

Asami’s sudden intake of breath makes Korra trail off, losing her train of thought.

“You do?” Asami asks. Her voice is filled with so much hope that the surge of affection Korra experiences threatens to bowl her over. She squeezes Asami’s hands.

“Yes, Asami, I do,” she says, as earnestly as she knows how. “We can’t pretend the last two years and two hundred and thirty-six days didn’t happen, but—”

“Two hundred and thirty-seven,” Asami interrupts her.

Korra shakes her head. “Two hundred and thirty-six. Trust me; I’ve kept count against my better judgement.”

“Wait, which day are you counting as day one? The day I left?”

“No, the day after I found out you’d left.”

“That’s not very scientifically sound,” Asami says with a frown. “It should start with the first day we didn’t see each other, which was the day I left.”

“By that logic, we saw each other at like two in the morning that night, so it doesn’t count.”

“Technically, yes, it was the same day, but I counted that towards the day before. And I considered my leaving the catalyst, which is why that’s my day one.”

“Well, I’m counting full calendar days of not seeing you. That’s why my day one is the day after you left.” Korra shakes her head again. “Why are we talking about this now?”

This time, it’s Asami that squeezes Korra’s hands. “Because it’s us.”

The warmth that floods through Korra at that makes her want to shout at the sky again, but for different reasons this time.

“And I agree,” Asami says. “We can’t pretend that gap didn’t happen. If we tried to pick up where we left off, it would do past us and current us a disservice. Also, conflict would inevitably arise because things aren’t like they used to be, and they shouldn’t be.”

“So… where does that leave us?”

“In love?” Asami can’t hide the way the word slides up at the end, denoting her statement as a question.

Korra bites down on her lip but is unable to suppress her grin.

“Yeah,” she says softly. “In love.”

Asami’s hands twitch again and she swallows heavily. “I’m so glad to be here with you again, Korra. I…” She takes a shaky breath. “I missed you… so much.”

At that, Korra just has to disentangle their hands and gently pull Asami into a hug. Only Asami feels like this in her arms; only Asami has that specific scent; only Asami hugs back like that.

“I’ve missed you too, Asami,” Korra says, her voice steadier than she’s feeling. “I’m really glad you’re back.”

Asami pulls back, presumably so she’s able to look into Korra’s eyes.

“Korra, I’m so sorry about the way I left,” Asami says in that earnest way of hers. “Writing a letter and thinking that was enough? Even if you had received it, it wouldn’t have been. I can’t deny that all of it was a little bit silly. Do you think you can forgive me?”

Taking Asami’s face into her hands, Korra leans forward. “I already have.”

“I felt scared, alone, betrayed by my father… I wasn’t thinking clearly at the time, but I should have realised later on how inadequate my goodbye was. The problem was that I simply wouldn’t let myself think about you. I couldn’t stop myself from dreaming about you, though I did my best to forget those dreams as quickly as possible.”

“You dreamed about me?” Korra asks, not caring at how smug about that fact she sounds.

“Yes, I mean—” Asami starts, then breaks off once she’s correctly interpreted Korra’s expression. She sighs. “Not like _that_, Korra.”

“It’s okay, I won’t tell anyone.” Suppressing a snicker is quite the challenge in that moment.

Asami shakes her head, and her expression is best summed up by calling it exasperatedly fond.

“Honestly, it was mostly things like… I’d be lost at sea, and then, coming out of the fog surrounding my boat, you would walk towards me over the waves—yes, you could somehow walk on water—and simply look at me, not saying anything. I could never… read your expression. But I always thought that you were disappointed in me. For being lost, maybe. For… leaving, I guess, though I wouldn’t let myself think it.”

“Asami,” Korra says, putting her mirth aside for now and becoming more serious. “It’s okay now. You never have to have that kind of dream again.”

“I’m so sorry, Korra,” Asami says, and her voice is so choked-up that Korra feels her own throat closing up. She pulls Asami close again.

“It’s okay now,” Korra says quietly, and realises she’s telling the truth. All the hurt caused by their separation seems irrelevant now. They’re together again and both willing to work on this, on them. On healing their respective wounds together and apart, supporting each other all the while.

“We’re together again,” Korra says. “We’ll figure it out as we go along.”

Asami buries her face in Korra’s shoulder. “No plan?”

“If you want one, then you’re going to have to come up with it.”

Huffing out a laugh, Asami lifts her head and stops short when their eyes meet. Carefully, Asami cups Korra’s cheek in one of her hands. Korra isn’t sure if they aren’t blinking or if they’re just always blinking at exactly the same time; it’s impossible to break eye contact.

“I love you,” Asami says, not loudly and not quietly, just with a steadfast certainty. “I truly still do.”

Korra swallows, then takes a deep breath. “I love you too.”

The smile on Asami’s face in response to that makes Korra miss a breath. She smiles back, and she really isn’t sure exactly when they start laughing after that, but they do. They laugh and laugh and laugh, free and bright, until they can’t stand anymore and have to lie down on the grass to clutch at their stomachs.

When she’s finally able to stop laughing and once she’s stopped gasping for breath, Korra rolls over to where a couple of giggles still haven’t let Asami go. She looks at her, studying her features, the dimples that show when she laughs, the sounds of her little gasps in between, the way that her nose crinkling shows she’d really like to stop laughing now.

Once Asami’s managed to catch her breath as well, she looks at Korra, and Korra doesn’t try to hide that she’s already been looking at Asami for a while now. They smile at each other.

Korra’s on her stomach, propped up on her forearms, while Asami’s on her back, hands still on her stomach. They take a deep breath in synch and lean towards each other in synch as well.

Their lips meet, and it doesn’t feel new or surprising, but it doesn’t quite feel completely familiar either. When they pull apart, Korra’s pretty sure that her expression mirrors the dreamy one on Asami’s face.

“I—” Korra starts, and she never gets a chance to find out what was going to come out of her own mouth after that, because right in that moment, footsteps crunch towards them.

“Korra? Asami? Where—Oh.”

Mako frowns down at them in concern.

“Are you two okay?” he asks. “Did you collapse? Do you need help?”

Opal shows up behind him and laughs. She grabs Mako’s shoulder and pulls him away with her.

“Bolin, we found them!” she calls. “They’re fine.”

Asami looks over at Korra with a confused frown. “Were we gone for that long?”

“No, they’re just busybodies.”

“We heard that!” Bolin calls from a distance.

“You were meant to,” Korra calls back.

“She’s not wrong,” says Opals voice, barely audible as she’s getting further and further away from them.

Korra and Asami look at each other with raised eyebrows.

“Well,” Asami says, and then seems at a loss as to how to continue.

Korra rolls onto her side and studies Asami.

“Still sure you want to live in this town?”

Without blinking, Asami holds Korra’s gaze and reaches out to take her hand.

“There’s no doubt in my mind.”

“Okay,” Korra says with a grin. As she rolls onto her back, she pulls Asami along and down on top of her. “Kiss me again, then.”

Asami’s laugh in that moment might just be one of the best sounds Korra’s ever heard. Her nature sounds playlist will simply have to give up the top spot in her ranking.

“All right,” Asami responds, and then leans down.

Thoughts of sound rankings and whales and anything, really, vacate Korra’s mind then. Her brain goes into standby mode; simply kissing Asami is more than enough. Now, if her ability to think did return to her and if she did create a ranking of her favourite moments in her life, this one would undoubtedly hold the top spot, uncontested.

But all she knows then is that the sun’s light is reaching them through the trees in dappled, warm patches, their friends are close by, and she and Asami are finally together again in every way that they want to be.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading!! it would be very lovely of you to leave a comment
> 
> title is from "be careful of my heart" by Tracy Chapman (I've managed to avoid using song titles as titles so far but it was just too perfect to pass up)
> 
> after this point these notes are just gonna be unnecessary background information so please feel free to skip them haha
> 
> okay, so I started writing this in April but stopped writing it pretty soon after bc I thought it was terrible and that it didn't make any sense whatsoever. I returned to it in June and July, tried to make it make more sense, and actually got quite far into it. I thought I was gonna finish it in July but then work got incredibly busy and when I had more time again I'd lost all motivation and had gone back to thinking it was terrible..... fast forward to October: I read through it again, still thought it was pretty terrible but that it had some good parts too, and decided that I wanted to finish it anyway
> 
> at this point, I have no idea what I think of this story tbh..... I certainly hope you don't think it's terrible (in which case you almost definitely opted out before you ever got to this point anyway, which is certainly fair enough), but if you do, I really understand where you're coming from haha. I did have a good time proof-reading it bc I laughed most of the time bc it's so incredibly silly in a weirdly endearing kind of way (to me) but I honestly don't know if I ended up managing to make it make sense at all or not.....
> 
> also, this was originally supposed to be two chapters (chapter break after Senna reveals that Asami did leave a letter) but I think it works better as a whole and I just prefer oneshots haha
> 
> also, I wrote Asami's letter out on paper before ever typing it and it fit on a standard-size sheet of paper where I live, so let's assume wherever they are, their paper isn't much smaller haha
> 
> also, I'll probably never stop writing people uncontrollably bursting into laughter and having to hold onto each other as a result
> 
> I wrote this in present tense bc I thought then it'd be easier to figure out the tenses in flashbacks but I'm not entire sure I always succeeded..... let it be known that I tried haha
> 
> but yeah, it is a bit silly, but people actually are that bad at communicating sometimes, somehow?? and misunderstandings happen incredibly easily and can create so much strife and sometimes we honestly can't even control it because how someone else sees something and what they decide to look for in something is rightfully entirely their thing. but we can try to be a bit better at communicating which will erase about 80% of stories being told atm but I think it's worth it haha
> 
> anyway..... my incredibly long end notes are over now. I hope you at least had some fun with this story bc of its silliness if nothing else, and I wish you all the best! take care xx


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